Our struggle is to bring social, political, and economic justice to our nation. This is an effort of the Chicano/Mexican American Digital History Project. https://sites.google.com/site/chicanodigital/

Tuesday, July 02, 2013

The Price of Immigration Reform is Steep

By David Bacon, Rosalinda Guillen and Mark Day

New America Media,

As
the Senate prepares to vote on comprehensive immigration reform, it's important
to remember that workers and immigrants have never made significant progress in
gaining civil and human rights in the U.S. without a fight. The same is true today.

No
political party or Gang of Eight can bestow upon undocumented immigrants rights
that can only be won through an organized social movement. President Barack Obama would not have
issued an executive order to defer the deportations of undocumented students
had not these courageous youths fought those deportations, staged protests, and
proposed their own immigration reform - the Dream Act.

The
Senate's proposed bill, however, does not reflect the reality in which most
immigrants live, starting with the reasons why people come to the U.S. to begin
with.

This
bill will not stop the flow of undocumented immigrants, its stated purpose,
because it does not address the root causes of migration. The North American Free Trade Agreement
alone displaced millions of Mexican workers and farmers, forcing them to leave
their country. When it went into
effect, 4.6 million Mexicans lived in the U.S. Today 13 million people do - 11% of Mexico's population.

Instead,
the Senate bill seeks to channel that flow in a way that benefits those
industries dependent on cheap labor, much more than it benefits immigrant
communities themselves. The bill
features guest worker programs and increased enforcement. These measures will not stop the flow
of people across the border, nor are they designed to protect immigrant
rights. But they do further
transform our immigration policy into a corporate labor supply system.

This
transformation has been going on since the immigration reform of 1986. In just the past few years, the U.S.
has deported 400,000 people annually.
At the same time corporations have recruited annually 250,000 guest
workers in formal labor programs, and many thousands more using other visa
categories.

This
reverses an important achievement of our civil rights movement. In 1965 the bracero program, an earlier
huge guest worker program, was abolished.
In its place, a family preference system became part of our immigration
policy, allowing families to reunite here in the U.S.. The new Senate bill, however, restricts
family based immigration. It makes
the labor needs of employers more important than family relationships.

There
are no assurances that the blatant abuses of guest workers in today's programs
will cease under the new law. Just recently, at a seafood processing plant in
Beau Bridge, LA, an employer blocked the plant's doors so women guest workers
could not take bathroom breaks. When they protested the owner threatened
violence against their families in
Mexico. Fortunately community protests came to the women's aid.

The
Senate bill criminalizes immigrants and migration. It expands the border
enforcement budget by $5.5 billion, while sequester cutbacks are closing child
care centers and laying off teachers at schools. It further militarizes the border by deploying drones, and
spurs the construction of more privately-run immigration prisons.

Hundreds
of thousands of immigrant workers have already been fired because U.S. law
makes it a crime for them to work.
But instead of decriminalizing work the new bill makes it mandatory for
all employers to check their workers' status through the E-Verify database and
requires photometric ID to get a job.
This will lead to an even larger wave of firings.

A
large percentage of the 11 million who need legal status will not qualify
because of the bill's restrictions, especially its income requirements that
penalize the poor. This E-Verify
database will make them even more vulnerable to pressure, since they will have
to work "off the books."
Families and communities will suffer, and the number of immigrants
forced to live in the shadows will grow.

Millions
of people hope to gain legal status and eventual citizenship, and create an environment for progressive
political change. But the current
bill is not a sure path. In recent
years immigrant communities and
unions have proposed far more progressive alternatives.

Organizations
among indigenous Mexican migrants seek to get rid of trade agreements that displace
their home communities in Mexico.
Fired workers from Silicon Valley to San Diego want to end E-Verify,
firings and the criminalization of their work. Organizers Washington and
Mississippi want an end to guest worker programs, and activists in Mexico
agree, saying that the recruitment system corrupts politicians and plunges
people into debt.

They
all seek a progressive alternative that would end the treatment of immigrants
as commodities valued only as cheap labor, and not as human beings worthy of
dignity and respect.

David
Bacon is the author of Illegal People--How Globalization Creates Migration and
CriminalizesImmigrnts, and the forthcoming The Right to Stay Home, both from
Beacon Press. Rosalinda Guillen is
director of Community2Community, women-led grassroots organization in
Waahington State farm worker communities.
Mark Day is the executive director of the San Diego Day Laborers and
Household Workers Association.